1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of network management. More specifically, the present invention relates to system failure recovery for management consoles, in particular, management consoles in support of Alert Standard Format (ASF) Remote Management and Control Protocol (RMCP), including its related Security Extension Protocols (RSP).
2. Background Information
Advances in integrated circuit and microprocessor technologies have led to wide spread deployment and adoption of computing devices. Examples of computing devices include servers, personal computers and “special” purpose computing devices. Personal computers may have form factors, such as desktop, laptop, tablet, and so forth. Overtime, maintenance of large number of sophisticated computing devices has become increasingly difficult.
Concurrently, advances in networking and communication related technologies have led to increased interconnection between computing devices, and deployment of networked client/server applications, across private and/or public networks, such as the Internet. As a result, advances were made in remotely managing client computing devices across one or more networks.
Among the numerous advances is ASF, a standardized format to enable remote system access and control of managed clients in both operating system (OS) present and OS-absent environments.
ASF includes various protocols, such as PET (Platform Event Trap) and RMCP, which are used by the managed clients to report the aforementioned managed clients state information, and for the management console to remotely control the managed clients, responsive to the reported state information. The reporting and management may be performed in either an OS present or an OS absent mode. RMCP has been extended to include various security related protocols, collectively referred to as RSP, to facilitate authenticated communication between managed clients and the management console. For further information, see e.g. Alert Standard Format (ASF) Specification V2.0.
Since under RMCP, a managed client is to be manageable even without the operating system, as a result, the OS absent portion of the client side implementation of support for RMCP (including RSP) is typically implemented in hardware. However, the hardware implementation typically has sufficient resources only for one management session. Such a management session typically has certain session data, e.g. a session identifier and a session key, associated with it. As part of RSP, a management console is required to present the proper session data, e.g. the session key, to conduct authenticated communication with a managed client.
As a result, if a management console encounters a system failure (also referred to as a system crash, or simply crash), and loses the current relevant session data of a management session of a managed client, the management console is unable to further communicate with the managed client. Since session closure is an operation, which RSP defines to be authenticated communication, the session can not be closed. Establishment of a new session in parallel is not an option, since as earlier described, typically a managed client in support of RMCP, supports only one open management session.
Thus, a soft system failure recovery approach for a management console in support of ASF RMCP with RSP is desired.